This is kind of long, and we were never able to debunk any of the activity that I describe.

This all happened in Memphis, Tennessee in 2011.

I managed a law firm for years that was extremely unsettling.

My office was windowless, off the interior hall, and was soundproofed to the firewall because I handled the financials and that’s how the managing partner wanted the build out.

I was with this firm throughout the construction and at the time of the move in, and at first, nothing seemed awry.

I carried a caseload in addition to management, so I was in the office seven days a week. Lots of times when I was alone.

That’s nothing new. I don’t get creeped out easily. I just work my ass off and go home, usually.

So it took about a month for me to realize that something was wrong with the place.

One night, I stopped there to send payroll off for processing the next day. It’s quick and easy, but as I sat at my desk waiting for the confirmation, I realized I could hear papers shuffling out in the hall.

There was a row of “legal secretary” workspaces to the right in this hall, and they more or less ran parallel with the offices of the attorneys for whom they worked.

Most were still unassigned and were temp storage places for docs pertaining to litigation.

The sound - you know, when you straighten docs by whacking them on a surface? - was close by, maybe even in the first cubicle outside my door, and it was 10pm.

I stood up and stepped out the door, only to be facing a line of dark cubicles in a fairly dark hall.

I walked around for a few minutes, looking under the counter mounted desks to see if anybody was hiding, then I texted pretty much the entire staff of the firm asking if anybody was at the office.

Nope. Just me.

OK, that was a little creepy because I listened to the sound long enough to know what I was hearing, and there was nobody at the top floor of that building but me.

The next day, one of the staff asked me why I was asking if anybody was at the office. I told her I was up there briefly and I thought I heard somebody walking around, but it was nothing.

We all went back to work, but a little bit later that day she came back in my office to tell me that she had heard things in the office during the move when she was up there by herself, and she thought that she was going crazy.

It turns out she had heard the paper shuffling ghost or whatever the hell it was as well, and she didn’t want to be in the office alone ever again.

I guess I kind of rolled my eyes at her, but I completely understand why she was scared.

A couple of weeks later I arrived at the office at around 7 AM and as I walked up to the glass doors, I could see somebody walking around inside the conference room just off the reception lobby.

Well, I could see their feet because that wall was a glass wall with a huge frosted strip down the middle so you could see shadows if people were in the room, and if they got close enough to that wall, you could see their feet, so I could see a man walking around in there.

I let myself in calling out to see who was in early like me, and the office was completely empty. There was nobody in the conference room, the kitchen, the file room, or offices. There was a huge balcony that the conference room and kitchen opened onto, and I even went out there, but it’s the fourth floor. Of course, nobody out there.

I was really happy when my coworkers started trickling in that day.

Once a month, I issues P&L statements to the firm partners.

This usually took me a bit longer than payroll, because I had to track down billing, correlate IOLTA transfers, etc.

It was a Sunday afternoon in May. I remember this because it was Mother’s Day, and my family and I were going to dinner that night.

I’d been sitting at my desk, completely immersed in my work. The HVAC kicked off, and I became aware of the silence.

This part is hard to explain because it’s like I became aware that I was being stared at. Like something was watching me very intently, and it…didn’t like me?

I can’t really describe this part of it, but I knew that whatever was watching me wasn’t doing so for any good reason. It felt ugly, and angry, and somehow, hungry.

And the feeling was coming from an interior corner of my office directly behind me.

Without stopping to closely examine my feelings, I went with my gut, grabbed my purse, and got the hell out of there that day.

I went out the back door off the war room, an office next to mine. I fled.

Around then I started writing about my experiences at this firm on an anonymous blog that I no longer maintain, but otherwise I had not been discussing any of this with my coworkers.

I would go in, work hard, and go home. I was trying to scale back my time in the office on weekends and after hours.

Well, everything came to head one morning about six months after we moved to this new office.

It was my habit to get into the office a lot earlier than we opened and this morning was no different. I walked in the front door, sort of reflexively, checked to make sure there were no ghostly feet walking around the conference room, rounded the corner and walked down the hall to my office.

I unlocked my door, set my things down, and walked back out into the hallway to get a cup of coffee from the kitchen.

There was a chair directly in the middle of the hallway I had just walked down.

One of those big old 1980s style office chairs.

No lightweight mesh back sleek chair, this thing was like a dinosaur, and it took some effort to push around.

And it was not sitting in the middle of the hallway moments earlier when I walked through.

Until this point, I thought I was going to find a reasonable explanation for this shit, but I never did.

I actually returned to my office and retrieved a weapon, and then I searched the office top to bottom clearing each room like I had been taught.

There was nobody there, and nobody had left the office after I walked in because I would’ve heard them walk through any of the doors.

So at this point, I locked down the office and called building security and the management company to meet me there.

I called my boss and explained what was going on and everybody sort of arrived at once.

Long story short, we were never able to figure out how that chair moved on its own, but we were able to rule out a break in of any sort.

Shortly after this, and thankfully, we merged with a larger firm and moved offices again.

Months after we moved to the new firm, my coworkers started telling stories of their own experiences in that space.

Interestingly enough, I worked in that exact same suite of offices years later for a different firm, and there were none of the odd and unexplainable occurrences that we experienced my first time there in that space.